Female Trouble

Posted on September 27, 2021 by thezman

Note: The Monday Taki post is up. This week it is a nice companion piece to the regular Monday posting. With Halloween approaching, it is a good time to focus on witches and the trouble they are causing. That and it will sell a few books for Ed Dutton. For those with a soul, the Sunday podcast is up behind the green door.

Early in the Covid panic it was clear that some people were embracing the panic for reasons that had nothing to do with public health. The harridan assaulting people in the grocery store over the bizarre new rules was doing it because suddenly she had a purpose to her life. This was starkly obvious with the Michigan governor, Gretchen Whitmer, who made herself harridan-in-chief. All of a sudden, inconsequential people had purpose and meaning to their lives.

The infamous TikTok videos featuring chubby nurses in scrubs dancing around on empty hospital floors had a similar motivation. White women with mundane lives working in hospitals were suddenly “front line workers” in the war against the great plague threatening humanity. Most of the women working in hospitals just went about their lives but many suddenly saw themselves in a different role. They were no longer just faceless nurses doing menial work. They were heroes.

Of course, another big driver of the live action role playing was the urban legends being traded on social media. In the early days it was not uncommon for someone to claim she knew several people who died from the virus. Statistically that was like saying you knew several people killed by dwarfs. Even today it is rare for someone to know someone who actually died from Covid much less many people. Even so, it became a common sighting on social media.

For many people, Covid and the drama surrounding it quickly became the purpose of their lives, giving them a reason to get up in the morning. The Covid skeptic, in fact, was largely a creation of the people embracing the panic. The panic players needed a foil, someone at whom they could direct the lines “Don’t you understand that people are dying!” when on the Nextdoor app. The people happy to be left alone were dragged into the Covid drama to be the needed villain of the story.

You see this with the vaccination business. For as long as we have understood vaccinations, it was known to be a defense against you getting infected. If you got the vaccine you were protected. It did not matter if everyone around you was not vaccinated, because you were vaccinated. That was the point of the vaccine, but that has been changed. Vaccines are now a collective good so the unvaccinated can be the needed villain in this drama.

The latest turn in this weird game is a new phenomenon in which women are sure they have Covid but they keep testing negative. The women suffering from this new and dangerous malady in the war against Covid describe it as “spooky” because they really want to test positive, but they keep testing negative. What is clear about the women afflicted with this new plague is they are heavily invested in Covid. In their time of greatest need, Covid is letting them down.

What is going on here, of course, is something that has been happening in small ways for some time. We have an abundance of unattached females in the population desperate for attention. They jump on every fad in the hope of making themselves the star of some minidrama related to it. You can probably mark the Virginia rape hoax as the beginning of this pattern. A crisis invented by political grifters was made real by a couple of women desperate for attention.

It is tempting to blame this on mass media. Ten years ago, this Covid panic could not have happened as we have far fewer intensely on-line people. The SARS and Swine flu epidemics are proof of it. In those outbreaks, social media was still in its infancy and mass manipulation with it had not been mastered. Those epidemics were serious and required a public response, but they never become full blown panics like Covid, because the tools were not available to do it.

In reality, social media is a symptom. Stand around in public and look at what people are doing as they wait. You will see far more women banging on her mobile device than men, unless the area is full of mothers. The moms will be tending to their children and gossiping with the other moms. There are plenty of men intensely on-line, but it is usually directed at things like sports. For women, they are on-line for the drama and the growth of social media has been in response to this demand.

This suggests that the witch problem, as described by Ed Dutton, is not entirely a problem of selection and biology. That is, the potential for witchery is a constant feature of Western societies that can be unlocked under certain conditions. We have not been selecting for witchery, but rather creating an environment that summons forth the demon from the female population. The internet is turning into a doomsday device that summons exaggerates the worst elements of humanity.

Worse yet, history does not offer an easy answer. In better times, a round of witch trials and the liberal use of the scold’s bridle would do the trick. In this crisis, the witches have already taken control. That means the witch trials are of men who failed to properly compliment a female coworker who was feeling blue. She then goes to the head witch in human resources and the victim is dragged in for interrogation. Instead of witch trials we have warlock trials.

Of course, the hunt for invisible Nazis and white supremacists is another modern form of witch hunting, mostly led by women. You have a sprinkling of socially retarded males in the group, but the main players in the hunt for insurrectionists are hysterical females imagining themselves being ravaged by a Nazi. In the old days, the witch problem was quickly addressed, so they never got hold of the levers of power. Today, the executive suits are littered with brooms.

Putting all of that aside, what Covid has revealed is that we not only have female trouble, but we cannot ignore it forever. The madness unleashed over the last year is finally showing up in practical ways. Prices for essentials are spiking, car production has stopped due to shortages. Shortage of things are turning up again, just as the brooms are coming out for another round of female empowerment. There is a limit to tolerating this and that limit is rapidly approaching.

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The Arc Of Trust

Posted on September 23, 2021 by thezman

In 1980, when Ronald Reagan was running for president, the people planning to vote for him were sure the media was biased against him. They focused only on the bad stuff and ignored the good stuff. The people voting for Jimmy Carter, on the other hand, thought the bias claim was absurd. They thought the media played it as fair as was possible in a matter of opinion. The big media players went out of their way to prove that they were just neutral observers reporting the facts.

It seems quaint today, but if you wrote your local newspaper complaining about unequal treatment, you could expect a reply pointing out the examples in the newspaper of both sides of the debate. If not a direct reply, there would be a length reply in the letters column addressing the issue. Newspaper columnists would often take the time to address the “alleged bias in the media”. Back then, it was important to the media that people thought they were neutral observers.

Fast forward twenty years and the people planning to vote for Bush still thought the media was biased, but by that point, conservatives were so sure of the bias they no longer felt a need to prove it. The center of gravity with regards to the media had shifted after the Clinton years. Even the people who were voting for Gore conceded that many parts of the media were biased, but their new line was that “right-wing” media, like Fox News and Drudge, was just as biased.

In twenty years, we moved from a world in which the consensus was that the media was mostly honest but a little biased to a world in which the consensus was the media was biased in favor of one side. Put another way, a tin foil hat crazy in 1980 thought the New York Times was out to get their guy, while in 2000 a tin foil hat crazy thought Fox News controlled public opinion. By this point, the mass media was no longer trying to prove they were neutral observers.

Twenty years on from the Bush election, everyone to the right of Hillary Clinton looks at the media as the marketing department for the DNC. Further, the only people who think the media is not deliberately lying about everything are the nutters who watch conspiracy outlets like MSNBC or CNN. The most popular “conservative” TV media performer is Tucker Carlson who dedicates a fair chunk of his airtime to pointing out the litany of lies that come from the mass media.

In isolation it is not a very interesting thing, but the media is a canary in the coal mine for the state of the culture. Forty years ago, most people thought they could trust the important institutions of society. Wackos were the ones claiming the government was covering up conspiracies and doing nefarious things in the shadows. The bulk of the population trusted the system, even while acknowledging the flaws. After all, humans are not perfect, so no system is perfect.

Today, the center point on the trust scale is over toward the lack of trust end but it depends upon the institution in question. Few people trust the media, so the center is way over on the skeptical end. Most people think the government is a blend of incompetence and dishonesty, but many still think the system can work with the right people in charge of it. Big business is another institution whose trust has collapsed, especially among right-wing people.

At this point on the timeline, the military, the economy, and technology are the only three institutions that people generally trust. Despite twenty years of failure, people still think the military can defeat any enemy if allowed to do their best. White people still proudly send their sons to fight. That is changing as it becomes clear that the people in charge are rabidly antiwhite and jarringly incompetent. We may be in the midst of a great sea change in white attitudes about the military.

That leaves the economy and technology as the things most people think they can trust to be what they claim. The bad news gets all of the attention, but most people still live pretty well in this country. Inflation and shortages are concerning, but most people accept that it is just temporary and will work itself out in time. Similarly, despite the damage done by the Covidians, people still trust technology to come up with reliable solutions to problems. The vaccination rate is proof of that.

The fact is people can remain content as long as their bellies are full, and they feel secure in their person. The lunacy of the Covid response was annoying, but few people felt it threatened their way of life. People were not being evicted from their homes or going without food. The entertainments were maintained, so they had things to keep them occupied while stuck at home. The Juvenal quote gets overused but that is because it is true. The last two years have proved it.

The question, however, is can a society keep the bread and circuses going when trust in the main institutions is collapsing? Trust in the economic system is a function of its relative performance. If no one trusts the political system or the mass media that promotes it, can we survive a serious economic downturn? Can we survive learning that much of what we were told about Covid was a lie? Can we still trust the economic system when we are ruled by corporate oligarchs?

The point of this is that when you take a long view, relative to a human lifespan, it is hard to see a bright future for the American empire. The arc of trust now bends inexorably toward a world where only fools trust their institutions. The future is a world where no one can trust anything or anyone and the only way to maintain order is through force. If the people at the top of the institutions see it this way, it would explain why they are so enthusiastic for authoritarianism.

Crisis Of Culture

Posted on September 22, 2021 by thezman

Imagine you are interviewing for a job and during the course of the initial interview you learn that the future boss is a big fan of F1 racing. This grabs your attention because you are also a fan of auto racing, especially Formula 1. You mention this to the interviewer who then tells you he is also a big racing fan. He jokes that he got the job because the big boss is a F1 fan. Eventually you get the job and find out that many of your coworkers are race fans, weekend gearheads and so on.

Now, an interest in motorsports has nothing to do with the work of the company or any of the jobs in the company, but the culture of the company, driven in large part by the big boss, has a strong connection with motorsports. Over time, even those with little interest in the hobby get interested because so many people at the company have a strong interest in the topic and talk about it often. As a result, the selection pressure favors gearheads and boils off those who were not gearheads.

This is not an uncommon phenomenon. Every company has a culture, even the largest corporations, and it usually stems from the founding stock of the company. A big part of mergers and acquisitions is to assimilate the acquired company into the culture of the purchasing company. In the case of a genuine merger, one culture eventually dominates the other. Truly merging two cultures is impossible unless they are so close that the differences are superficial.

Something like a company-wide interest in motorsports is a useful way of understanding the much deeper aspects of organizational culture. The sorts of people who into car racing are going to have a set of common personality traits. Race fans will tend to be more risk tolerant and more interested in problem solving. If the big boss was a woman into her church, the company culture would reflect the nature of women who are active in their church. That company would be more conservative.

The culture of an organization is ultimately about how the organism as a whole goes about solving the problems for which the organization was formed. In the case of a company, the primary challenge is profit, but every industry has peculiar challenges when it comes to holding down costs and maximizing sales. The culture of the company evolved to meet those challenges. Successful firms have evolved internal processes upon which it relies to solve these daily issues.

This is important in understanding the nature of a crisis. In business, there are good years and bad years, no matter how well run the firm. The business cycle is immutable, it seems, and it is often industry specific. The firms with a good company culture are built to ride these waves, minimizing losses on the down swing, and maximizing profits on the upswing. The not so well run firms face a crisis in the down years, struggling to hold on, but party like rock stars during the good times.

There are two types of crises. One is the normal challenges that face every organization regardless of its culture. The down times feel like a crisis to the well run business, but they have the tools to manage it, so it is a situational crisis. Getting through it is simply a matter of execution. For the firm lacking a culture prepared to address the down years, the crisis is structural. Their survival does not depend on their execution, because they lack the necessary tools. Instead, it relies on fortune.

Put another way, the crisis that truly threaten the existence of the firm is one with roots that go back to its origin. If in the case of the well-run company the nature of the business changes dramatically, it will face a genuine crisis for which it may not be equipped to solve. It then has a crisis with roots to its founding. The crisis that threatens the viability of an organization is always going to be one that started long before it was noticed and is a symptom of a systemic problem.

This is a useful way of thinking about how the managerial elite of the American empire is prepared for the future. The culture of the elite is, in many respects, a product of a bygone era in the empire. During the Cold War it was a bipolar world, but in reality, it was a unipolar world from the 1970’s until the end. The Soviets had turned conservative and were no longer a realistic ideological threat. The party was just holding onto power by minimizing risk. America was the center of the universe.

What this means is that for a few generations now, the system has been selecting for people who will serve an established system. In the early part of the 20th century, the system selected for creative people, risk takers and those willing to reconsider the old way of doing things. The old order was giving way to a new order. America was on the cusp of becoming a global empire and it needed talent at the top to help reorganize domestically and solve the challenges globally.

In the present crisis, the culture of the ruling class is lacking the tools to address the problems, but it also lacks the sort of people who will look outside the system. It has been selecting for highly conservative people, with respect to the culture of the managerial class, for generations now. It is why the system violently vomited up Donald Trump and continues to dry heave over the memory of him. The culture of the ruling class is built around adversity to change.

The old Hemingway line about bankruptcy is overused, but it reveals the truth about the dynamics of a collapse. In retrospect, the signs were all there, but the modes of thought at the time made it difficult to detect. The collapse of the Soviet Union is a great example of the Hemingway quote. It was happening a little at a time starting with Khrushchev and then happened all of a sudden under Gorbachev. The culture of the system prevented it from meeting the challenges of the age.

This may be what we are seeing today. The culture of the American ruling elite began to adapt to the unipolar world in the 1970’s. That is when the great outsource of the industrial base began as part of the financialization of the economy. It was formalized in the currency arrangements of the 1980’s and has remained static ever since. It is an old system built for an age that no longer exists. The crisis is the conflict between their view of the world and the reality of the world.

It is easy to see that America has a culture problem, but it is not what people think of when they hear the term. It is much deeper than the bourgeois degeneracy we see in the mass media. It is the structure of the ruling class. Their understanding of reality is rooted in a world that no longer exists. Its culture of problem solving is no longer compatible with present reality. Like the poorly run firm hoping to weather a downturn in the business cycle, they are counting on luck to save them.

Public Tyranny

Posted on September 20, 2021 by thezman

Note: The weekly Taki post is up. This week is a return to a topic that cannot be stressed enough, it seems. More important, the editor there insists on using lower case for Left and Right, which seems wrong to me. The word left is a direction, while the word Left is a proper noun for a political philosophy. Clarity seems to require capitalizing these words. There is also the Sunday Thoughts podcast up behind the green door. There are no grammar disputes in this week’s show.

Imagine if all of a sudden you were transported to a place where all of the walls are clear and no one was allowed any clothing, other than that which is completely transparent, like the walls of every structure. Everything about you, even your most intimate habits are on public view. Obviously, this would also mean that everything about everyone else is on public view. Further, your thoughts can be read by anyone and everyone, so that even inside your head is now public.

It makes for an interesting science fiction plot, because for most people such a world would be a nightmare. Even the most freakish exhibitionist has some need for privacy in his life. According to the Bible, the first thing man did when he became self-aware was cover himself. The story of Adam and Eve was created in a time of minimum privacy, yet people at the time understood that there is a natural human need to maintain a domain of life away from public view.

Even though privacy is something that exists to some degree in every settled society, we can be sure that it did not exist before humans settled down together. A group of humans hunting and gathering within a range would have no privacy. They would do everything as a group. Of course, this would have bound them together, as sharing is the nature of human relations. Since these groups were blood relatives, the lack of privacy probably helped them survive in the wild.

What this means is that the concept of privacy probably evolved along with human settlement, which means it is an asset for settled people. Once groups of humans began to cooperate so they could operate in groups larger than the Dunbar number, they must have evolved traits that maintained the small group cohesion, while preventing conflict between groups. The first private moment was one group not sharing what they truly thought of the other group.

It is not hard to see how privacy was an asset for people living in relatively close proximity in small villages. Lots of unrelated males, for example, would be cooperating, but also competing for mates. Similarly, the females would be weaving the social fabric of the village, while keeping an eye on one another to make sure they did not lose their mate to another female. The privacy of home life probably evolved as a way to avoid the poaching of mates within the community.

Even if we put mating aside, the creation of a private domain separate from the public domain is an obvious peacekeeper. In a small group, disputes can be solved by the leader imposing his will on the group. Once you get past a certain number, that is impossible and small disputes could easily become big disputes. The private domain is where Grog can tell the missus what he really thinks of Trog, without creating a feud with him and possible drawing in the whole community.

Another point in favor of the essentialness of privacy in large societies is the fact that authoritarians always seek to violate privacy. The communists, for example, would listen in on citizens and rummage through their lives. For this reason, the Founders put in the Bill of Rights the “right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures.” What constituted reasonable in this context was a direct threat against the security of society.

As a narrow tool of terror, violating the privacy of citizens is effective, but very expensive to maintain, which is one lesson of the Soviets. It is not just the practical cost of mass spying, but the cost to social trust. In a world where anyone can be a conduit for the state to listen in on your life, the willingness to trust strangers drops to zero. The only people you can trust are blood relatives and associates who have everything to lose by violating your trust. Criminal gangs did well under communism.

There is another angle to privacy. Privacy is the key to one’s identity. It’s why militaries march recruits around naked so much in their initial training. Criminal gangs, like some motorcycle clubs, will do the same thing to prospective members. Take away a person’s privacy and they can no longer stand apart from the rest. It’s hard to hold yourself distinct from others when they know even the most intimate things about you, which is why authoritarians love violating the privacy of others.

This may be one key to understanding why modern America appears to be having a nervous breakdown. The microprocessor revolution has had many consequences and not all of them have been good. It has made it cheaper and easier for authoritarians to pry around in the lives of others. Everyone lives in a world where they are tracked by agents of the state, who also act from private interests. They are even trying to tease out our thoughts from our internet activity.

Not only has technology made it easier for the state to violate your privacy, but it also has weaponized the worst elements in every society. People who call themselves “extremist researchers”, for example, are just busybodies encouraged to violate the privacy of their fellow citizens. For most of human settlement, there were rules to keep this type under control, because they endanger social cohesion. The gossip is a greater threat to the whole than any criminal, because they undermine social trust.

There are many things that are causing American society to crumble, but one big one is the inversion of privacy. The lives of citizens are put on display, but the facts of public life are routinely hidden in waves of lies. Activist organizations like CNN threaten to ruin private citizens if they refuse to be props in their charades, but also tirelessly work to prevent the public from knowing the truth about public policy. The collapse of privacy is turning America into a large-scale prison camp.

The Limits Of Vampirism

Posted on September 16, 2021 by thezman

Imagine if tomorrow, the Federal Reserve announced that the top ten home builders in the United States are insolvent. They would cease paying interest on debt and probably would default on principal payments. Further, their bonds would be frozen for some period as the Fed sorted through their finances. It is not too hard to imagine as 13 years ago something close happened when Lehmen Brothers collapsed. It started a long financial panic and then a long recession.

Something similar is now happening in China. The nation’s largest developer is no longer able to pay its creditors. The Chinese government announced yesterday that the firm will not make interest payments and probably will default on principal payments, although that remains unclear. China Evergrande has liabilities over $300 billion, but this is China, so no one knows the real number. All anyone knows is they sit at the heart of the Chinese financial and real estate system.

One thing that is universally true in all times and all places, even in China, is that real estate is the base asset. Mother Nature is not making more of it, so it remains a constant and therefore the basis of all value. It is why this development is not just another story of corrupt financial dealings. As in the West, all land in China is leveraged and that leverage is treated as an asset, which means it is leveraged. If Evergrande stops paying its bill, many other firms stop paying their bills.

At this point, the financial world is not all that concerned with what is happening in Chinese real estate, but they were not concerned about the mortgage crisis in the United States until it was a pending disaster. The old claim that financial markets look forward and therefore offer a glimpse of the future was always nonsense, but the Lehman disaster proved that markets are not the future. The world of finance assumes tomorrow will be yesterday but better.

At the minimum, the Evergrande crisis is a test of the new Chinese model of governance ushered in under Xi Jinping. The relatively loose days of Chinese capitalism are coming to a close as the party imposes new rules on the economy and cracks down on its pirates. The focus is now on domestic growth, rather than cheap labor and exports. China is no longer the cheapest or most productive labor market in the world, so it cannot remain an export economy.

No one really knows if China can successfully make the turn from export economy to one driven by domestic consumption. The breathtaking modernization of the country is impressive, but that required massive cooperation from the West. If the United States had a ruling class concerned with the welfare of the American people, for example, the Chinese miracle never would have occurred. The feckless American ruling class cannot help China transition to a domestic demand driven economy.

The bigger question with regards to China and this current financial crisis is can the Western financial model survive the Chinese transition. For the last thirty years the corrupt Western ruling class has preserved itself like all corrupt ruling classes have done and that is with bread and circuses. The Chinese economic miracle has kept inflation down and money printing up. Cheap goods from China have been an essential part of maintaining stability in the West.

Inflation is already becoming a problem in America. In most parts of the economy, the food markets are plagued with supply chain problems and rising prices. Then there are labor market problems, some of which were created by the Covid panic, but others are the result of demographics. Those Baby Boomers taking early retirement due to the Covid panic are not going to be replaced by the magical people that we see on television shows and commercials.

Of course, the great retirement boom that is just started in the US will put massive strain on programs like Social Security and Medicare. Those programs represent trillions in debt that can never be paid in current dollars. Medicare is now projected to run out of cash in ten years. Social Security has been insolvent for a long time now, based on generally accepted accounting practices. Its assets were spent years ago by the government, leaving it with worthless IOU’s.

People are pointing to the current crisis in China as a replay of the Lehman debacle 13 years ago, but in reality, it is a continuation of it. Starting in the 1980’s, the people actually in charge of the world began to transition the global economy away from an asset based system to a credit based system. The great debt explosion that ensued took many forms and the rise of China was one aspect. Without the massive growth in global debt, China’s growth would have been impossible.

The thing with debt is that it has to eventually be repaid. That means there is a hard limit to the amount of debt that can be generated. A system based on the assumption that debt can expand forever will naturally end in a crisis when that that assumption runs into the reality of the debt limit. In this regard, Lehman, the mortgage crisis and now the Evergrande crisis should be seen as warning tremors. One day soon there will be no way to paper over one of these crises.

Step back and look at what has happened over the last half century and what you see is an effort to mitigate the demographic decline of the West. The reason China was so attractive to the West is she was full of young people. China’s utility to the West is in decline because she is rapidly getting old. The massively complex system that is the Western financial modern is just a way to turn the youth of other societies into cash for the Western welfare state. Their vigor is our safety net.

The trouble is the system drains the vitality of all those exposed to it. Japan was the first example of a formerly fecund society drained of its youth and vitality by exposure to the Western economic model. Korea soon followed. Now we see all of the same signs in China as she nears the end of her economic cycle. The only place left with lots of young people is Africa, but even the scheming of Western elites will never be enough to conquer the dark continent in this way.

In this context, what is happening in China is a sign that the system of endless credit expansion is really the implementation of a system that converts civilizational vigor into cash for a tiny minority. The natural limit on the expansion of credit is set by the limit of young people available to be consumed. China’s future was written in her one child policy and ultimately that would set the end times for the West. Once we run out of kids to convert to credit, the plates stop spinning.

The Blessings Of Covid

Posted on September 15, 2021 by thezman

Long before the Covid panic, it was obvious to many on the dissident right that the main problem in the West was a core of true believers. These are fanatics who are immune to facts and reason, driven by a desire to pull the roof down on society. On every issue, they seem to come down on the side of the society wrecking option. The Covid panic has brought this into stark relief The Covidians are more deadly than even the exaggerated version of the virus.

The Covidian is a useful case study in how the believer engages with the world. Since this started back in the spring of 2020, the true believers have shifted positions, often contradicting yesterday’s deeply held position, without explanation. The cult leaders seem to have moved along an authoritarian scale, which at least provides some rationale for their actions. The rank and file believers, however, have flitted from one position to another like a murmuration of starlings.

The most recent example is their view on vaccines. In 2020 when Trump was promising to accelerate the development of a vaccine for Covid, the true believer was sure vaccine meant “deadly Hitler poison”. Their cult leaders were on their media platforms swearing to Gaia that they would never take the Trump serum. After all, there was no way a safe vaccine could be developed in such a short period. It was just another effort by Trump to destroy our democracy.

Within hours of Biden being installed, they shifted to swearing that these vaccines were a perfect defense, an impenetrable defense, against Covid. If the bulk of the people were vaccinated by spring, the pandemic would be over as we would quickly hit herd immunity or pretty close to it. Everyone could go back to normal. The skeptics with whom they agreed just minutes ago were now QAnon conspiracy nuts. All good people would be vaccinated and only the crazies would refuse.

There you see the mind of the true believer at work. Theirs is not a world of facts, reason, and a vast area of uncertainty, as it is with normal people. Instead, their world is those inside the walls and those outside the walls. The walls are an abstraction created by the good people who lead the faithful. Those who are inside the walls are the good guys, the faithful, while those outside the walls are the bad guys, the undifferentiated other that is always at war with the faithful.

This hive mentality is not easy to maintain in the face of reality, so the faithful need a constant stream of reinforcement. In a prior age, this came from physical gatherings where the believers could affirm their convictions and have those convictions confirmed by fellow members of the collective. Churches have always been social groupings as much as spiritual ones. For those committed to an ideological faith, the need for spiritual and social reinforcement is no different.

In this age, mass media provides the steady stream of affirmation. It is not an accident that the hardest thumping crazies on the Left are also intensively on-line, obsessed with things like Twitter. Social media is their tether to the collective. The more they remain connected, the more intense their need to feel connected. The swarming effect of crazies on social media platforms is not an accident. Like a fish in a school, the believer gives herself over to the collective whole.

Here is an example of how the mass media feeds the true believer. Note the exaggerated language like “hyper-contagious”. The true believer operates in extremes, so this necessitates the over-the-top description of things. In this case, describing the variants as increasing dangerous is a way to maintain the fervor. You see, you must remain vigilant. The evil one is always out there. If you let down your guard, he will get you with one of his hyper-contagious variants!

Note also how the definition of vaccine has changed. Since the advent of vaccines, the concept has been a binary one. If the vaccine worked, your immune system would be ready to handle the specific virus and prevent infection. If not, then you would get infected by the virus. Now a vaccine is something like an amulet. If you are exposed, it protects the faithful from the workings of Old Scratch. You still get infected and are contagious, but your soul is pure so you will be safe.

This line is instructive. “Even the sky-high efficacy rates of mRNA vaccines during clinical trials left a little window of imperfection — and those trials happened long before this virus evolved to replicate quicker, spread faster and infect even more unsuspecting human hosts.” You see, no matter how vigilant you are, there are others who may let their guard down and give the evil one a chance to strike the innocent. This is not about you but about the community as a whole.

This is why Joe Biden said the other day that his administration would protect the vaccinated from the unvaccinated. The tether to biological reality has been cut and we are now in the world of the true believer. The words vaccinated and unvaccinated no longer have a medical definition. To the true believer, those words now mean the anointed and the benighted. The elect are those who have laminated their vaccine cards and wear eight masks in the car while driving alone.

This is why pointing out the fascism of Covid passports has not effect. The true believer needs that display item. They desperately want the affirmation that comes from holding up their iPhone to be scanned and the god in the machine confirming that they are one of the chosen. This is why they celebrate the death of those the mass media claim were ant-vaxers. Their blood extirpates the evil from the land in the same way a public sacrifice washes away the sins of the guilt in the blood of the innocent.

Counterintuitively, Covid may have been a salvation. The fever-rage of opposition to Trump was channeled into a ridiculous but so far mostly harmless identity cult built around the coronavirus. We saw the destructive power of lunatics in a full rage allowed to seek their own satisfaction. Covid probably saved the country from endless riots and urban warfare. The real blessing of Covid is that it has given our crazies a way to get their fix without blowing up the world in the process.

Political Weather

Posted on September 14, 2021 by thezman

Depending upon where you live, the news could be full of dire warnings about how the virus is still raging and you must remain vigilant. Alternatively, the news may be about how those heretics somewhere else are being visited by an extra wave of the virus for mocking blessed Covid. It did not take long for the panic to become a racket. The Covid industrial complex is like a public works project. Everyone involved is committed to one thing and that is never ending the job.

Of course, there is always time for a reminder that the secret invisible army of Hitlers is out there in the shadows. Everyone needs to be on the lookout for white supremacy and all its manifestations. Every once in a while someone utters a discouraging word in the earshot of a minority, so the local news team rushes into investigate. Sometimes the national scandal monger chopper in a team to investigate something, which gives the locals a reason to put on a show about it too.

Many people have dropped out of media consumption for this reason, but they cannot escape the constant reminders that you better be afraid. It is impossible to live in the modern world without being exposed to some of it. The only means of escape is to unplug from all mass media, including the internet. Even that is not enough, as your friends and family will still be connected and some of them will be there to remind you of the various things that are supposed to keep you up at night.

Short of doing a Ted Kaczynski and relocating to a cabin in the wilderness, there is no escape from the reign of media terror. No physical escape, at least. The thing is, few people want to remain in this hyper-emotional state, so they find ways to filter it out and get on with what matters in life. You see this with the Covid lunacy. It is as if people are thinking, “okay if I wear this ridiculous mask around in public, I can be left alone to do the things I need to do so I’ll just wear the mask.”

Similarly, the latest vaccine mandate is being met with ignorance by most people as they have checked out of the Covid drama. They simply ignore the Covid news now, so they missed it. Employers will probably ignore it as well, as the last thing they need right now is another way to hassle their workforce. The bureaucracy could very well ignore Biden’s orders as well, as they are permanent, while he is temporary. This reality was made plain under Trump for four years.

One reason people are not in the streets demanding an end of this stuff is they have found a better solution. They just ignore it. Look around the dial over the weekend and you see that the sportsball arenas were packed with fans. They were not wearing masks or social distancing. It was like none of it had happened. You can be sure that television ratings were back to the prior levels. As far as most Americans are concerned, it is football season. Covid season is over.

The same can be said the bombardment of race in mass media. Spend a few minutes watching one of those sportsball shows and you quickly see that every ad is some version of hate whitey. Most people, of course, have long ago developed the ability to not see ads of any kind. Even ads that are attention getting, like the ones created for the Super Bowl, are forgotten the next day. Humans in a mass culture develop a force field to block out the things they dislike.

This is why the Soviet system staggered on for so long. The oppression under Stalin was unsustainable, but Stalin died before than could be tested. Instead, they got a decade of feverish experimentation under Khrushchev. That failed and threatened the stability of the system, so he was pushed out and what replaced him was a new normal in which most people were left to live as best they could within the rules. People ignored the craziness of communism so they could live.

In the current age, things move faster than in the prior age, so we may be living in an accelerated version of this. In the Soviet Union the joke was, “they pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work.” Perhaps the new normal in America is “They pretend to rule over us and we pretend to play along.” The rantings of the current old man in the White House become background noise. People pretend to notice, but otherwise get on with their lives and don’t make a fuss about it.

After all, much of what our political class seems to be doing of late is best explained by an effort to get attention. Sandy Cortez showed up at some swanky gala wearing a dress with the slogan “tax the rich” on it. The only reason this horse-faced barmaid is in Congress is she is good at getting attention. No one really cares what she or any of these people have to say about anything. The only reason to notice them is when they do something stupid like this.

We may be in the phase of the Soviet system where the empire is now on autopilot and the people in charge are just playing make believe. Similarly, the people they are supposed to rule are playing along on the surface but are going about their lives as best they can despite the noise. Unless and until there is a genuine crisis, politics is just an increasingly freakish carnival act. Since the pols are locked out of the cockpit, they are left to gain our attention by other means.

What we may be at the tail end of is a holiday from reality. Since none of these crises ever amounts to much, people pay attention if they need to feel some excitement, but otherwise tune it out and just live as consumers. There are minor ups and downs, but nothing important really happens, so no one feels the need to be too worked up for too long about anything. Like the weather, if you don’t like what is happening, just wait and things will change on their own.

The Need To Believe

Posted on September 9, 2021 by thezman

Eric Hoffer noted that people who are prone to join mass movements tend to join many of them, often going from one to another. It is not unusual for someone to go from one cause then to another that contradicts the prior cause in some way. The old stereotype of the middle-aged woman driving a Volvo festooned with bumper stickers from various causes does not spring from nothing. The vegan activist will be into saving animals, sustainable farming and oppose nuclear energy.

A good recent example of this is the amazing overlap in people who worship Gaia and those who are now Covidians. The people who carry grimy canvas sacks to the market as a sign of their piety are now wearing three masks in the car as they driver alone to the Whole Foods Market. That does not mean all Covidians were Gaia worshippers, but almost all Gaia worshippers embraced Covid. HBD people embracing Covid suggests their interest in biology is something other than empirical.

What is going on here is that humans are hardwired to believe. Like almost all human traits, the need to believe (NTB) trait operates on a spectrum. At one end is the zealot who is consumed and defined by her belief. At the other end is the skeptic who tends not to accept anything at face value. The reason you don’t see skeptics protesting the latest fads is they tend to think protesting is a waste of time. On the other hand, the zealot is ready to act on the slightest provocation.

For most of human history, the NTB was kept under control by settled society through various means. Religion was the main control. The zealots were funneled into the the shared beliefs of the group. The structure of the belief system kept these otherwise unorganized minds from exploring new ways to express their NTB. When that did not work, the belief system had ways to handle the crazies. Maybe they were declared witches or expelled from the community.

The collapse of Christianity as the unifying belief system opened the door for every sort of alternative belief system. Those with a strong NTB were attracted to these new belief systems like communism. The more utopian the ideology, the more attractive it is to those with a strong NTB. It is not an accident that Marxism, for example, has had a profound influence, despite the fact it has never had a broad appeal. A relatively small number of fanatics can accomplish a lot when unified.

The great geneticist J. B. S. Haldane claimed that fanaticism is one of man’s greatest inventions, even though it was not an invention. In reality, fanaticism is just a cognitive trait like any other. The ancients noted that some men would fight like lions while others were more cautious. It was not a big leap from that observation to cultivating this quality to create elite units of warriors. The berserkers in Norse mythology were not insane, but rather the most enthusiastic of their fighters.

Today, the berserkers are those ready to lecture the rest of us about the latest edicts from the high priests of Covid. These people are irrational or insane. They are the simply most enthusiastic of believers. Their NTB goes to eleven, while everyone else stops at ten. It is why they never notice the contradictions. If you point out that Fauci can never keep his story straight, it bounces right off of them. It is not that they do not understand, it is that their NTB overrides reason.

Even the most fanatical believer, however, is prone to doubt. Since the bulk of believers are not berserkers, this means the bulk of any mass movement is made up of people in need of regular affirmation. Here is an example in the ironically named Popular Science instructing the faithful on how to tease affirmation out of their loved ones. Note that the first item on the list is the justification for trying to convert those who have yet to accept Covid in their life. The religious overtones are not hard to miss.

Note the term “vaccine hesitancy”. They cannot allow for disconfirmation, so the assumed model is one camp are those who have accepted Covid and those who have yet to accept Covid. The latter group is just scared and uninformed, so it is incumbent upon the former group to guide them to the light. All of sudden. being an annoying pest about Covid is transformed into a righteous cause that proves to the believer that she is on the side of angels, saving mankind from evil.

Also note the communitarian aspect of modern mass movements. We have to sit in the dark and walk to work because we all share the same earth. If one person refuses to use those grimy canvas sacks, then we all suffer! Similarly, the vaccine is a community good that only works when everyone is vaccinated. As long as there is one disbeliever in our midst, we will continue to be punished. The only thing missing from the Covidian toolkit is the flagellants whipping themselves in public.

What Covid has revealed is that the only path out of the madness that is infecting the West is to sort out how to manage the fanatics. That is easier said than done, as it means creating a new religion and prying these people out of power. It also means that political power alone is not enough. As long as the fanatic population is left to operate like a hive without a queen, they will keep finding new queens. Usually, those queens will be seeking dominion of the rest of society.

Abductive Junction

Posted on September 8, 2021 by thezman

Note: There is new content behind the green door. For those interested in the Western, I have a review of the 1969 classic The Wild Bunch. The role of the Western is something I’ll come back to again. It is an interesting topic.

The fraud trial of Elizabeth Holmes begins this week, and it promises to be an enjoyable bit of theater for those interested in the workings of the Cloud People. Holmes founded a company called Theranos when she was just 19-years-old. She had dropped out of Stanford and promised to deliver miracle drug testing equipment. She attracted the support of all the beautiful people, who saw her as the living example of everything the Cloud People believed about the world.

In reality, the company had nothing to offer other than the promise to fulfill those prophesies the Cloud People cherished. Holmes adopted the Steve Jobs black turtleneck and spoke in a weird deep voice. Like all grifters, she was short on specifics, but long on inspirational flattery. This got some of the most famous men in the world to support her company, giving it an aura of authenticity. As a result, Theranos stuck around for a dozen years before it was revealed as a fraud.

In many respects, Holmes is the poster child for the new religion. The reimagined gender role for women is just women doing the things men normally do. You see this in movies where the normal male lead is replaced by a strong diverse female who does all the same things as a male lead, even the personality. There is really nothing new about the new gender roles. The new ideal female is nothing more than a fraud against nature, a fraud that is eventually undone by observable reality.

That is the story the Feds will tell in court. They will point out that nothing about this company was based in reality. Holmes and her business partner, another unicorn of the Progressive imagination named Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani, knew all along that their new technology would never work. They hid the facts from investors in order to swindle them, the textbook definition of fraud. More important, she damaged the cause of women in the workplace, which is her biggest sin.

From the perspective of the Dirt People, the Elizabeth Holmes story is great fun and also a reason to keep fighting. One look at this woman and a normal man in control of his senses could see she was trouble. Many people at the time made this point, but the Cloud People fell for her shenanigans hook, line, and sinker. It is a good reminder that these people are not evil super geniuses. They are frauds like Holmes who now have real power, but they are not unbeatable.

The Holmes story is also a good example of abductive reasoning. This is the type of reasoning that makes a conclusion on what you know or what you think you know, which is always an incomplete set of data. You wake up in the morning and you see the driveway is wet, so you quickly assume it rained overnight. There could be other explanations, like your automatic sprinkler is on the fritz or a pipe burst somewhere during the night, but rain is the most likely answer.

The important thing about abductive reasoning is that the explanation for the given facts does not have to be right to be accepted. After all, the explanation is simply the most probable, based on the data set. This is why in the hands of a good storyteller, abductive reasoning is very powerful magic. Humans are hard wired to accept stories, so a good story that explains what is going on can quickly become gospel. A good story that confirms the gospel is never questioned.

This is what Holmes was doing with her presentation to Cloud People. She presented herself as living proof of the one true faith. She was every bit as talented as the pale males in Silicon Valley. She could do anything a man could do, even sound like them and run an identity cult like Steve Jobs. Apple became one of the world’s biggest companies selling toys disguised as holy relics. Holmes was the female Steve Jobs, but saving the world, rather than entertaining it.

Another interesting aspect to the trial is the plan by the defense to blame her former partner for everything. The old story of gender said that women were always the victims of male oppression. Women who killed their husbands for the insurance would always accuse the dead man of being abusive. That story was being replaced by the new story of female empowerment. The jury will be presented with a conflict of the two absurd visions of womanhood promoted by the Cloud People.

This story is a good example of how facts play a supporting role in life. People are believing machines. Even the most cynical hard cases among the Cloud People believe they are on the side of angels. It is why facts and reason have no effect on these people, outside of the extremes. Once the reality of Theranos was too much to ignore, the Cloud People abandoned their unicorn, but only after it became clear that Holmes was a mockery of their beliefs, rather than confirmation.

That is why the endless presentation of facts and reason falls on deaf ears. The Cloud People will never abandon their faith for mere facts. The only thing that will get them to abandon their faith is a better faith. This was the central insight of you know who back in the last century. His story of redemption covered the observable, and his new facts was the mortar that held them together into a coherent narrative. That is what awaits the Cloud People running the American empire.

Civic Marxism

Posted on September 7, 2021 by thezman

Back in the heyday of conservatism, Bill Buckley would often say you can know everything about a person’s politics from their options on abortion and Israel. It was true to the extent that it put them one side or the other of the consensus. By the late 20th century, the ruling consensus in Washington was pro-abortion and pro-Israel, but not publicly enthusiastic for either. These two issues were useful proxies for foreign policy and social policy at the time.

Something similar can be said of race and culture. Those who deny the reality of race are on one side of the great divide, while those who accept biological reality are on the other side of the divide. There is no middle ground. Those who think culture is a manufactured good are on the side of biology deniers, while those who think culture is the product of biology and time are on the side of the realists. Again, these are mutually exclusive positions that cannot be reconciled.

That is what makes this post over at the American Mind interesting. According to their website, “The American Mind is an online publication of the Claremont Institute dedicated to the ideas that drive our political life.” Claremont was founded in 1979 by four students of political theorist Harry V. Jaffa, the man responsible for the second founding thesis. He is also why so-called conservatives preach the glories of Lincoln to their mostly Southern supporters.

The title of the post is the first clue that the writer is not only on the denialist side of the great divide, but in their left-wing camp. The first sentence sounds like something from a grievance studies paper. It is pure cultural Marxism. “The fabricated black race should never have been born. It was confected out of false biological taxonomies by Europeans to justify a system of human physical bondage that, paradoxically, brought black people into the historical process.”

Whenever you see the phrase “historical process” you are almost always dealing with a man of the Left. This is right out of the Young Hegelian view of history that was allegedly rejected by Strauss. If there was any doubt as to the views of the author, the next sentence clears it up. “It was a cruel, artificial construct, and blacks have suffered enough under it.” When someone speaks of race as a social construct, they do so not to clarify, but to obscure the reality of biology in human affairs.

A further example of that desire to obscure reality in the fog of rhetoric is this sentence further down in the post. “A taxonomy that makes human distinctions based not on cultural differences—which can objectively be defined as the set of dominant beliefs, customs, and traditions of a homogenized or non-homogenized group—but based on race, which none of the conceptual markers that allow us to predict or pick out any moral characteristic of a human being, is valorized by most blacks.”

This is another habit of the far-left. They conflate issues so that the easy to defend can be blended with the impossible to defend. In this case, he claims cultural differences can be quantified. This is true to a point. Then says racial differences tell us nothing about moral characteristics of people. This is also true, but it is incorrect to compare culture with morality in this way. It is a false comparison. Further, race helps us explain cultural differences and is quite useful at predicting them.

Then we get this sentence. “Holding a racial identity turns one into a practicing racist. White supremacists of all stripes, either of the North American variety or the Nazi counterpart, have given us ample evidence of the nefarious nature of strong racial identities, especially when they are wedded to a political ideology that demonizes racial/ethnic minorities such as blacks or Jews.” That is jargon right out of the grievance studies department of a state university.

It is tempting to dismiss this as irrational ranting or maybe a display item used by the Claremont people to show they are not racist. The conventional Right has always loved putting the intellectual version of a lawn jockey on the pages of their publications to own the Left by being to the left of them on race. Donald Trump spent a good deal of his presidency celebrating his gifts to people who hated him just to prove that he was not the evil racist his enemies claimed.

Beyond that, it suggests that the path of civic nationalism, the sort preached by people like Ben Shapiro, must end up in cultural Marxism. Once you deny that biology is real and has a real impact on social organization, you are left with a problem. How does culture come into existence, if it is not a function of blood and soil? The answer they are left with is that it is a product imposed on people by other people. Culture is just ideas, and they can be anything you like.

There is nothing more Marxist than this interpretation of culture. The cultural Marxist seek domination of the institutions for this reason. They believe culture is the product of societal institutions. If you control them, you can control the culture. The civic nationalist, like Strauss, believe there is an ideal culture. If you get that right, then the institutions fall into place. In both cases, the underlying assumption is that the nature of man plays no role in the final outcome.

To deny that biology is the prime mover of both history and culture inevitably leads to man declaring himself the prime mover. This is what we see here. The writer assumes humans can be talked out of their racial identity. There is a short hop from there to thinking that humans must be compelled to abandon their natural identity. This is the same path that all such thinking takes. If man is free of nature’s god, then he can recreate himself and his fellow man by his own lights. He becomes man’s god.

The end of most journeys is determined by the starting point. It is why intellectuals of all types talk about first principles. It is that starting framework that lays out the path forward and ultimately sets the destination. When the first principle is a denial of observable and measurable reality, the road suddenly opens up to wherever the imagination can conjure. So far, all of those imaginary destinations have not been the utopia, but rather a hellish bloodbath of murder and mayhem.

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